Tuesday, May 15, 2012

glory of the gospel ministry

I was moved by what I read below -- especially the last paragraph -- taken from a message entitled "The Glory of the Gospel Ministry," by Norman A. Madson. It was delivered at the 1950 Convention of the Norwegian Synod of the American Evangelical Lutheran Church...

In his novel Kristus for Pilatus (Christ before Pilate), Waldemar Agar tells of an aged pastor who has given his all in a faithful ministry, but who, as the work becomes too strenuous for his advanced age, and the many new demands which a new age has brought with it make it imperative that he retire, stands before a picture of the thorn-crowned Man from Nazareth, whom the unjust Roman judge is about to send to the cross, and these are the thoughts which crowd in upon him:

There is the “kingdom within you” in its highest potential. An independent kingdom, -- an incomprehensible kingdom, whose defeats are victories, whose mightiest representatives are they who are trampled in the dust, whose most powerful laws are unaccepted and unwritten by men, and whose mightiest men walk with the aid of a staff and a crutch. A kingdom in which the sighs of the impoverished are imperative commands, and an imperial edict is null and void. A kingdom which continues to conquer the world by not giving a rap about what belongs to the world -- a kingdom in which men win what they have lost and lose what they imagine themselves to have won. The most inconceivable, the strongest of all kingdoms established for all eternity by a forsaken Man in the most lonely moment of His life, when He succumbed and believed Himself (as was actually the case) forsaken of God.